


Shadow

by RedRoseWhite



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Rise of Kylo Ren (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bendemption, Brief Mention of Illness, Brief mention of medical procedure, Child Abandonment, Crass language, Deformity, Drug Use, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Kyber Crystals (Star Wars), Murder, No Pregnancy, Safe to Read if You're Triggered by Pregnancy, Suicide, canonverse, ghost story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:41:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27259606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedRoseWhite/pseuds/RedRoseWhite
Summary: After defecting from the First Order, Ben Solo is settling uneasily among the Resistance. He skulks around the base at night and has no friends.  Shadow, a Resistance recruit with mystical abilities, reveals to Ben that he is haunted by a ghost. Who is responsible for this haunting? Can Ben fix it?
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 16
Kudos: 27





	Shadow

**Author's Note:**

> Please enjoy this ghost story, which I wrote for Reyloween. <3
> 
> Moodie by [Love_andbalance](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Love_andbalance/).

A few hours after I was born, my parents left me by the edge of the river to die. The river is important to my people; it brings gifts like huge seed pods that sprout into life-sustaining trees, which we eat from and live in. It takes away those who have died of sickness so that their shrouds don’t infect the priests who stand at the gates of life and death. When you leave something next to the river, its fate is left up to the Gods. 

The priest who attended my birth told my parents not to look at me; I was misshapen and therefore cursed, and if I stayed in the house it would be made unclean. 

When I was seven, I prayed to the Gods to show me my parents, and they sent me a dream of my mother holding me and singing a song about the lekku-grass and the broadleaf trees gathering night’s dew for the morning sun to drink. My father was nowhere to be seen. This is how I know that my mother ignored the priest and looked upon me, and my father did not. I don’t know who took me to the river. Maybe if I ask, the Gods will show me. In the faith of my people, they will always speak to you if you’re willing to listen. 

I am told that I was found by the other race of sentient beings who lived on my home planet. They sheltered me until a Zabrak woman came looking for rare herbs. She had white hair and black lips and markings on her face; and when she saw me, she whispered to green smoke that must have told her to take me away. We flew from that place on her ship, and she left me on Batuu with a merchant and his wife who had no children of their own. They were always kind to me. I had a childhood where I was safe and warm and well-fed. Aside from having no friends, because children were afraid of my ugliness, I wanted for nothing. I spent my time reading. 

First, I learned all I could about this realm, and once I had memorized the principles that direct and govern the reality in which I exist, I began learning about other realms. I practiced meditation and learned every texture in the fabric of existence until I could navigate the surface of the Unity that blankets all things. 

I know about Jedi and Force-adepts, and by birth, I am neither. I simply learned how and where to look for things that most do not see. 

That’s how I know the Newcomer is always being followed. Not in the way Captain Dameron wishes he were. By a haunting. She looks unnaturally young, but her spirit has aged by tattering at the edges. She trails after him, quiet and stoic. Sometimes she looks like she is reaching to touch him, but mostly she hangs there, unseen by everyone but me. I wonder if he can feel her. 

  
  


I only see the Newcomer at night. People talk in the mess hall of a dark element among us, a great snake who slipped the First Order’s clutches and is nesting here uneasily, turning the leaders against one another. Split among who is quick to trust him and who is recalcitrant. Held by day in a bunker near the General’s complex, he moves around the base in the tolerant and forgiving dark. 

One lunch shift, a crass and odious fuel engineer says; “Jedi cunt must be very tight, to leave the galaxy’s throne for it.” 

When the engineer shows up at the medbay later, half-carried and half-dragged, with teeth knocked loose, I tell Dr. Kalonia that we don't have any of the good smooth, cooling gel packs left. Guess he’ll have to make do with blocks of ice in a nubbly towel on his swollen eye and fat lip. At least he has the decency to refuse to say who pummeled him, bruising his body with two different sizes of fist, and that brings my respect for him from negative numbers up to an even zero. He’ll probably say something terrible again tomorrow, but I tolerate helping him this much. 

  
  


It's my week for night shift and instead of assisting at the medbay, I’ve been assigned to take inventory of the spare parts, fuel rods and cables before the runners make another trip to Dantooine for supplies. They’re taking an old cruiser that we found floating abandoned after a pirate skirmish above Ajan Kloss. While we were cleaning it out, I found a secret compartment with bricks of Spice. That’s how I sleep now. I only use a small bit, but I have enough for a lifetime of small bits. It used to be so hard to get to sleep, missing the warmth of anyone in my bed. Now the Spice is my warmth.

Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that I have to be a person. I love the illusion of being a shadow, that’s why I tell everyone that is my name. Nobody notices shadows, they are just accepted as part of the landscape, and everyone walks through them without expecting them to speak. 

Today, there was a wedding on base, two pilots got married and there was a flat, sweet cake for everyone, stuffed with cream and jam. I had to go there and smile and exist, where others could see my twisted form. I had to pretend for their sake that I am happy, that they don’t need to worry about me, that there is nothing they need to do. It hurt, as it always does, but I have long since learned that it does not matter what happens to me. When I cry, like I am now in the storage shed, everyone goes on walking between the barracks, the mess, the showers. Boots are shined and X-wings are refueled and romance films are queued up on the holonet terminal. The insects chirp in the trees under the moons. Leaves in yellow and green fall and float to join the others on the muddy forest floor. Nothing is wrong, all is well. The night sky is silently brilliant with stars, and me sitting under them heartbroken is as natural as the waterfall, misting off around the edges.

Crying makes me tired, which is good. I take deep breaths and count the little fuses again, to make sure I got it right the first, the second, the third time. I’m focussing so hard on the numbers that I don’t break to wipe my tears just yet, and he sees them, the Newcomer, when he slips between a stack of crates and the wall and finds me there. They are a mess on my face, dripping from my jaw like melting icicles, striping on my cheeks, pooling at the corners of my eyes. I don’t care if my crying face looks ugly; I always look ugly. My crying face is only wet. 

“You,” he says softly, creeping towards me on smooth, gentle treads. He’s hunching a little, trying to make himself seem smaller. Is he worried I’m afraid of him? I was working in the infirmary four weeks ago when he returned from a recon run carrying a feverish, half-conscious Jedi with what turned out to be a simple ruptured appendix. I saw his eyes then, before anyone knew it was something easily fixed with a keyhole incision. I’ll never fear a thing from him now.

“Are you all right?”

“Oh, yes,” I smile grotesquely. “Um, today was long, and I am tired. Did you,” I turn the conversation to him, hoping to slip away as soon as I can, to be alone, where I belong, “Did you come to meditate? I will leave.”

I know he meditates sometimes, because he has a nexus of the Force inside him, like all of his kind. They commune with it in stillness, and hone their souls. 

“Wait,” his hand touches my arm, warm and strong. “Don’t cry alone.” 

I want to laugh in his beautiful, carefully-formed face. He makes it sound like a terrible thing, like something that should not be. For me, crying alone is a bird’s spring song, it’s the blossom that makes the fruit. It may be an injustice when it happens to him or his beloved or the brides from today, a tear in the fabric of life that demands to be sewn together and mended. When it happens to me, it’s just how the world is made. No one and nothing is coming to change it. It would be like trying to coax the forest into not being green.

I try to think of how to make him see this, how to explain that my destiny is to live parallel to everyone, never crossing paths, but in a moment he is just putting his arms around me. 

I used to beg the Gods for such things. 

They heard me, before I gave up, and they moved his heart to get him to hold me like this, even though I have no right. They are so very merciful. So generous. So kind. 

He smells amazing. His body is warm. He sways, as if he wants to soothe me, as if doing this is worth his time. My heart swoops and soars and I put every scrap of consciousness I have into remembering this moment, this answer to my prayer. For these moments, having skin to live in is a blessing. I feel like something that belongs and fits in the world. 

I rest my hands on his back very lightly, trying to exist peacefully in his arms without taking anything from him. I am here for him to give what he feels like giving, and then walk away, feeling pleased with himself. He wants to be a man who comforts crying strangers. I will help him be that.

The back of my brain melts into gratitude until the warmth and the scent and the pressure of the embrace draw gently away from me. The ghost at his heels regards me with a neutral face, but I look in her eyes and smile, so she knows that I see her. He thinks I am smiling at him. I’ve forgotten that he doesn’t know.

“You look like you feel better,” he says.

“Yes, thank you, that was lovely,” I say as calmly as I can. Then I walk to the door. I’ve imposed on him enough. “Have a good night,” is the polite way we part, and I head to the clearing twenty paces from the base, where my Spice-bricks are waiting, stashed and hidden among the roots of a Broadleaf tree. 

  
  


The next time I see him, it's moonlit on the tarmac. He's roasting a colander of nuts in the embers of the bonfire they lit for Pava’s Name Day. 

“Those smell amazing,” I say. They do. The roasting gives them a sweetness they wouldn't have otherwise. The aroma floats in the air like a cloying ribbon, given complexity from the smoky scent of the ash. The spirit is doing peaceful loops above the crown of his head, like a spinning halo.

“They're Rey’s favourite,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck. “She snacks a lot.” 

Ever since he gave me that gift in the shed, I’ve felt like I owed him something, so I offer him the only thing I can that he might value. 

“Did… did you know that you have a ghost? With you always, on your heels.”

He stops poking at the embers for a moment. His shoulders shift but he doesn't move his arms. 

“I thought I might. It would be… fitting.” He says.

The great snake of the First Order, come to nest among us. It's the life of a haunted person, for certain, someone who trails tatters behind them. The form of the ghost floats down to hover next to him, strangely clear in air that shimmers from the heat of the firepit. “What does the spirit look like?” 

“It’s… a young woman. Human, and a little shorter than you? Built strong, and she wears a brown tunic.”

“Can you tell the colour of her eyes?” 

She can hear us. She drifts up, close to me, so that I can tell, and say it to him. She _wants_ him to know. My chest clenches. This is something that will never be undone. 

“Grey-green. Like… like the sky here when it rains.”

His mouth quivers and twists and his eyes get wide, as if they are making room for tears.

“And… and her hair.” He has a note in his voice that sounds like he is about to touch something so beautiful he cannot resist it and so white-hot that it will maim him forever. She’s turned her face from me to look at him too. It's the last piece, and she knows it. 

“White, it's white.”

In two heartbeats, he falls to his knees, hands limp and useless like old rags. Sobs choke out of him in a stuttering chain. The spirit swoops close to him again, and goes back to circling above, as if she didn’t just crush him. 

“Why are you here?” he croaks miserably. “Oh, Voe,” Her name is drawn out like a moan. “Why are you still here?” When he looks up and around, his face is painted with helpless anguish. “Why is she still here?” He asks me. The ghost - Voe - doesn’t look at either of us, just flies around and around.

“I’m sorry, I don't know,” I tell him, lifting my hands between us like I’m waiting for him to tell me what to do with them. “She doesn’t speak.” 

I want to help the Newcomer, but there is only one thing I can do for him right now. “...I can tell by the smell that the nuts are about to burn.” 

He leans over heavily and uses the long handle welded to the metal colander for its purpose, to haul the food from the embers with a yank. It clatters on the ground, full of an aromatic gift for the Jedi, perfect and warm. 

“I’ll - I’ll leave you, I’m so sorry!” I blurt out, and then I run to the edge of the tarmac and into the forest, where he doesn’t follow, like I knew he would not. 

  
  


I find him in the storage shed after two days of rain. Little pools are gathering on the floor, in the spots where the roof is too rusty to keep it out. The Newcomer is sitting on a crate, and I see the ghost hovering, rising like steam above him, before I notice what he has in his hand.

“That's the tether,” I blurt, without even greeting him or announcing my presence. It’s only that the connection is suddenly so _strong_. His ghost - Voe, he called her - is polarized by the crystal he’s turning over in his hand. He curls his fingers and twirls it in his palm. It's a dull orange, and it looks wan, as if it attracts only the loneliest light. 

He looks up at me. His face looks more worn than it did the last time I saw him. Diminished. As if the rain carried some of it away. 

“My crystal is holding Voe here?” He asks. I nod. Three raindrops drip heavily next to us and splash on the hard-packed dirt.

“It - makes sense…” He murmurs, glancing back down at the crystal, then at me. “She was, she was the first person I murdered.” The Newcomer looks right at me when he says this. “Really murdered.” It’s part of his way back, owning these things. I did not know this Voe, but do I know that when the Newcomer found a person of no consequence who was small and hurting, he put his arms around them. At this moment, I have grace to share. I nod again and he goes on. “When I bled this, that was what I thought of, to give the final push. Get me to that place. She was my friend, and I killed her. She was unarmed. Helpless.”

Understanding rushes through me, a cascade of all the words I devoured as a child.

“That’s your kyber?” I half-ask. I know it is. He squeezes it again and his mouth twitches.

“I found it when I was fourteen. Its song was… beautiful. It was in a cluster of dozens of others, and they were all singing to me. I was confused, I had thought that only one would sing, the one meant for me, but then I realised I needed to choose the one whose song made me _feel_ something. It was this one. I touched it, and my heart ached.”

The spirit is humming, I can hear her now. As if she’s trying to join the story, teach me the Newcomer’s kyber-song. 

“Does it sing anymore? Since you cracked it?”

“It does,” He sighs, clenching his fist once more. “Only sometimes, and it isn’t the same. The old song had started to hurt me. There was a note in it that would break anyone, after a while.”

“Which note?” I try to ask it humbly. He doesn’t have to tell me.

“The harrowing one? Hope.” His fingers unfurl and he stares at the dull, orange stone again. “That one went silent when it bled.”

Voe swirls and bends her ethereal presence to loop around him, streaming like a battlefield banner. She gestures as if she is touching his face, and then she looks at me with a stare that pierces. He’s just gazing at the crystal, and I can feel all of us creeping toward the same answer in the damp silence of the shed. 

“Do you think if I heal it, she’ll go?” He asks so quietly, as if he doesn’t want her to hear, even though she will. She hears everything, she’s been there the whole time. It gives me shivers to think of all of the things she has seen since the moment she died.

“She might,” I reassure him. “Do you want to try?”

Above us, she starts humming again. 

“What song is that?” I ask impulsively.

“Song? I don’t hear anything,” the Newcomer says.

  
  


For three nights, I watch from the edge of the forest while he creeps down the ramp of the ship where he bunks with the Jedi, under both moons, the large and the small. On the third night, she follows him, clasping one of his hands in both of hers. I can hear them, even though I am not very close. Sound carries on the tarmac and the rest of the base is quiet.

“It’s making you so tired,” She says to him.

“Knowing she is tied here makes me more tired.”

“Ben, just, let me help you. You know that I know how to do it.” My ears burn at the weight in that sentence. There is more there than just the words, like a very long poem about gods and heroes I don’t know of. We all pause and breathe in the brief silence that follows, while he decides.

“This is something I owe. It’s my debt, Rey. I’ll pay it.”

What passes between them next isn’t formed with words, it’s shown in the way she gathers up his other hand so that she is holding both, draws them together to press in the centre of her chest. Bows her head, the nighttime illumination of the base bringing out the copper in her braid, and kisses his knuckles. The Newcomer brushes his lips on her forehead, gently draws his hands from her grip. 

“I won’t be long,” he tells her. She nods an acknowledgment and turns gracefully to go back inside the ship.

He slips into the shed and for a while, the air around it turns different, dancing with whorls of white and orange mist. It feels like he is pulling something through himself, skilful and deliberate, like wool on a loom. On the fourth night, I go to him again. 

Voe greets me near the doorway once I have entered; as though she can venture further from him, now. The tumult of the Newcomer’s effort to heal the crystal is so strong I can almost feel the energies of Day and Night brushing on my skin, pressing like phantom fingertips. It is floating before him as kyber usually do when Jedi commune with them, much paler than before but still with a fissure within. He grasps it from the air and releases some of his concentration when he realizes I have come. We barely need words to discuss this undertaking; most of it lives beyond words, anyhow. He seems even more tired than I have ever seen him, and before long he admits that the meditation required to do this thing is very, very hard. Voe swims back and forth between the two of us, and I feel prickling in my spine, the feeling I always get when it is time to be of service. To carry purpose into a hollow moment.

So, I ask him if Spice would help.

  
  


He does it all quickly as if he doesn’t want to change his own mind. Voe is trailing a bit further back than usual as I lead him to the roots of the broadleaf tree. He kneels carefully and pulls out the tablet-sized case that holds the brick with one hand, then opens it with deliberate, purposeful movement. 

“Measure it by your own hand,” I tell him. “Take a flake the size of your smallest fingernail”. He uses the silver tool I kept inside the case to chip a flake from the corner that’s been gouged away by me. It is brownish-red and glitters a small amount. He uses the tool to crumble it on the back of his hand and snorts it away, and then Voe comes swerving close as he settles to sit against the trunk, closing his eyes. 

When his hands and arms relax, palm-up, rolling on his knees, I realize I will have to help him with more than the Spice. Voe and I both put our faces next to his, and she speaks to him in a voice he’ll hear at last. 

“Ben,” she calls. “Ben.” He opens his eyes again and lolls his head from one sloping shoulder to the other. His tongue moves in his mouth as if it has grown too ponderous and large. 

“Remember the crystal,” I whisper urgently. “Take up the crystal and heal it.”

“Oh,” Ben sighs at us. “Yes. Voe. My crystal. The song. Yes.” It’s as though the words are a distance away from his mind and he has to reach very far to find them. His pupils are enormous like an animal’s, and he is looking past every solid thing into a place where only energy is real.

Voe starts humming again. A small creature scampers behind us, darting under the oval leaves, grey-green in the light of the moons above.

With slow, underwater movements, Ben pulls the kyber from his pocket and closes his eyes again, but this time instead of his face being at rest, it is tensing with focused purpose. After a moment where he breathes purposefully, drifts away into slumping bliss, then forces himself to focus with more rhythmic breaths, the crystal lifts into the shadowy air and floats before us. It and the air around it are vibrating with the influence of the Unity and the Newcomer’s meditation and perhaps even Voe’s song.

For hours, hours where I do not stop or rest, I keep on murmuring, reminding him why he is here, and Voe hums to him, and even though it is almost dawn before the crystal is whole and clear, I feel peaceful and well. With the setting of the smaller moon the insects of the morning begin to creep for the gathering dew. Voe seems less vivid and the Newcomer, Ben, is sweating, but not diminished or pale. When he stands, he seems free of the Spice. Voe does three swoops around his body like a loose bandage on a limb and launches herself up to the sky, flying further than I have ever seen her go. 

The Newcomer peers at my lifted expression. His lips part, settle closed, press together, then part again.

“She’s flying,” I tell him. “I think it is done.” We smile at one another for the first true time. I take a moment to memorize his face like this, before the next task takes him. 

The next task is now. 

“Take the Spice to the infirmary, where they can use it medicinally,” I tell him. “And… and I would like to be buried near here, if that is all right. I like the way the moonlight hits.”

My body, my shell, is not far; I left it the night he held me. I knew the world would offer me little better than that moment, that was the summit of my soul. My tool took eight, nine, ten fingernails worth of spice and it all went into my body. I lay near enough to the waterfall so that its sound filled my ears, my eyes silver-starred with the night sky until the silver covered everything, blinding me. It was such a peaceful end to an utterly beautiful night. The Newcomer follows with silent, cautious steps until he is gazing down at my body among the leaves. In the five nights I have lain here, unsought and unmissed by everyone in the Resistance, something in the forest has eaten most of my left hand, but the rest of me is waiting patiently for burial, quietly greying with the trees as witnesses.

I only expect the Newcomer to return to this spot with a shovel, but once he’s broken ground and dug for a while into the afternoon, a wispy form approaches too, floating between the trees like a wayward veil. 

“I went so far,” Voe tells me, tugging my hand, much the way I saw the Jedi do on the ramp of the ship. “Come away with me. There are mountains in the distance, with creatures I have never seen.”

Even though I thought I would stay to see my grave completed, I can’t ask Voe to wait. Besides, my body is already laid in there and I trust it will stay. The Newcomer is honouring my wish. 

“Goodbye, Ben.” I say to him, moving to stand opposite, hoping he can still see and hear me, and he can. I know this because when he stoops down and draws the kyber from his pocket, he looks directly at me. He brings it to his lips, then lays it carefully in my grave. If it ever sings again... it will be to me. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you as ever to my wonderful betas, [Denzer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Denzer/) and [Andrina_Nightshade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Andrina_Nightshade/).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Penumbra](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28391424) by [Zabeta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabeta/pseuds/Zabeta)




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